Authors: Adriana Lisboa
I never did use the shoes that Elisa gave me. To be honest, I didn’t like them, the gold buckles in the corner. Besides which, they really were too big for me: there was a one-centimeter gap between my heels and the backs of the shoes if my big toes were touching the front of them. When I walked, the heels would slap up with a brief delay, like flip-flops.
I really didn’t care for heels anyway. I didn’t at the age of thirteen, and I still don’t at twenty-two. Elisa’s shoes are still untouched in my wardrobe to this day. I don’t like high heels. What’s more, at twenty-two I still wear a size six.
Lakewood, Colorado. A strange place. But its strangeness didn’t bother me, because that Denver suburb was, to me, a mere stepping-stone. Something I was using to achieve an objective. A bridge, a ritual, a password that you utter before a door and wait for someone to open it, while you tap your feet on the sidewalk, looking around for the sake of it. Being there was being in transit, and Lakewood and I had no relevance in each other’s lives.
Alone at home, those first few afternoons, I looked out the window and saw the immensity of the sky nudged by the mountains in the west. There was some green, but it was so paltry that, for me, it didn’t count. As far as I was concerned, green was either exuberant and dense or it wasn’t green. I didn’t consider those stunted little desert plants green. The trees on the street seemed useless, an unsuccessful attempt to prove something unprovable; the air swallowed them, the space swallowed them.
Before, I was accustomed to walking along under trees. I moved along Copacabana’s dirty, narrow streets and bulging sidewalks with a canopy of leaves overhead all year round. Now, I found myself in a semiarid city where the streets were wide and clean and there was no shade to be found.
Before, it was exaggerated tropicality, with relative humidity somewhere in the vicinity of eighty percent. Perfect for cockroaches. The cockroaches were so happy in Rio de Janeiro, that easy, welcoming place. Now, the relative humidity was about thirty percent.
And there was the waterless, sterile heat, which left my body dry and my skin like a sheet of paper. Use lots of moisturizer, a woman on the plane told me. I rubbed in moisturizer three or four times a day. All over my body, face and lips. At night it hurt to breathe.
You get used to it, said Fernando.
That was something Fernando knew a lot about. Getting used to things. After a time I would look at him and see the man-who-got-used-to-things.
He could work as a farm laborer in São João do Araguaia, he could survive behind the bar of a London pub and in the dry air of Lakewood, Colorado. He could survive entire armies and half-lived love affairs. Women who disappeared. Women for whom he needed to disappear. Crossing borders and ideologies. He could even survive me and my sudden reappearance, popping out of a box like one of those clowns with a spring for a neck. And he could say OK, as he had done. There was something heroic about it.
I soon noticed that the dryness of the air had some advantages. For example, I could leave my bath towel bunched up any old which way after a shower, and what in Rio de Janeiro would have remained tenaciously in the folds, evolving into a stench and finally mold, in that lascivious commitment to life, that embarrassing explosion of fecundity and virility of the tropics, in Colorado quickly rose up to the heavens and was no more, and the towel would sit there, dry and stiff, a makeshift statue.
In Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro, there were cockroaches, almond trees, mosquitoes, salty air, pigeons. Churches. Mundial Supermarket. McDonald’s. In Lakewood, Colorado, there were rabbits, prairie dogs, crows. Churches. SuperTarget. McDonald’s.
I decided to be absolutely, unflinchingly courageous. Whatever my life was, happy or unhappy or none of the above, it was my business. Besides which, these categories seemed as untrustworthy as ‘important’ had been when I was packing my suitcase. I was going to do whatever had to be done and it wasn’t going to be my dry nose at night that was going to make me feel sorry for myself, after everything that had happened. No way. My situation was osseous; it was of the order of structures, without flesh, without glaze. I fit in a thirteen-year-old body and all of my material belongings now fit in a suitcase weighing twenty kilos. And everything was guided by the potential shadow of the past – a midday shadow, that you don’t see, but which knows how to conceal itself in things, ready to start leaking out across the ground as soon as the planet turns a little to one side.
In general, I didn’t do much in those first few days in Colorado. I stared out the window at the street, and the street stared back at me, disinterested. We both yawned. I avoided looking at myself in the mirror. I got shocks when I touched door handles because of the static electricity. I tidied what could be tidied in the house, and considered it a way of paying Fernando back, albeit insufficiently, for taking me in, like when Elisa had put me up.
I was given instructions on how to use the washing machine, the dryer, the dishwasher, the microwave and the electric oven (you have to be VERY careful when using the electric oven, Fernando said three times, and mentally I said for fuck’s sake, Fernando, I’m not deaf or dumb).
A pair of used skates appeared from somewhere, and when there was the slightest scrap of a cloud in the sky, making the sun a little less vehement, I went skating around the neighborhood. A block further each day. Expanding my circle of influence. Marking my territory in a territory that wasn’t mine, as a well-meaning but mistaken animal would, using his bodily fluids. Doing it for the sake of it. And the trees were always few, always short and frail, even when they weren’t, because the wide streets and the empty spaces and the sky, like arrogant gods, compelled them, with a raised index finger, to wither.
It was the first time in my life I’d noticed the relative size of things. Everything was small in that place. Even when Fernando took me to see Denver’s rich southern suburbs. The enormous two- and three-story houses were painted neutral colors and sat there as placid and sleepy as cakes displayed on the counter of a giant confectioner’s store. After a while it all began to seem a bit dangerous, like a recurrent nightmare in which nothing actually happened but there was a promise of something macabre in the stillness of the air, in the absence of people walking down the street, in the conformity of the lawns that were like fake smiles, in the tame, ball-shaped bushes: circus performers.
A man in a gaudy T-shirt rode past us on a bicycle. His thigh muscles rippled under the tight fabric of his black shorts which were padded in the backside. He was wearing a pointy helmet with a rear-view mirror. I had never seen a helmet with a rear-view mirror.
It was strange not to see people walking down the street. I thought of a post-apocalyptic world in which the air was unhealthy and the people had to protect themselves, zipping back and forth between the insides of their houses and the insides of their cars and the insides of commercial establishments.
I found it strange that the stores, all gigantic, had
their backs
to the sidewalks (maybe that was why no one was walking around) and opened their doors onto bulging parking lots with marked parking spaces and oceans of SUVs.
I tried to calculate the number of rooms in the houses by the number of windows – they must have had six, seven, eight rooms.
But, even there, what was in excess was the sky stretching overhead and the flat ground that ran into the alpine dissidence of the Rocky Mountains in the west, rising up over fourteen thousand feet, and extended monotonously in every other direction for what was left of the state as far as Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma in the east, New Mexico in the south and Wyoming in the north. Those new names whose history and meaning I tried to dig out of the collective unconscious.
Flat, smooth, dry, tedious, dusty, uniform, continuous, constant, boring, unattractive: this was my impression of the plains in the first few months. What existed there was the dictatorship of space: an infinity of ground to the right, an infinity of mountains to the left, an infinity of sky cloaking everything.
The mansions of Denver’s wealthy suburbs couldn’t be considered anything but ridiculous in their ambition to compete with the space. The seven rooms, or however many there were, ten, twenty, were nothing. Up high, on their western trail, the mountains were laughing their heads off at it all. The mountains were even laughing their heads off at the buildings in downtown Denver. When you arrived at the International Airport, the city centre was a tiny cluster the size of a marble. In it you could barely make out the skyscrapers, which didn’t scrape the sky at all, because the Colorado sky had yet to be scraped by human hands of concrete: the fifty-six floors of the Republic Plaza, the fifty-two of the Qwest tower (where you read, at the top: Qwest), the fifty of the cash-register-shaped building. None of it made the slightest difference. Not the mansions, or the buildings, or the artificially green golf courses in the middle of the almost-desert aridity. Reality obeyed another scale.
Maybe that was why I had the feeling, right from the very first day, that the sky was lower there – and, even so, far above the skyscrapers, both present and future. As soon as I left the well-behaved density of downtown Denver, along came that enormous solitude to crush everything in existence: flesh, metal, leaf, trunk, stone. A solitude imposed by the space. A solitude of disperse atoms, of things out of stock on supermarket shelves.
You lose a little self-certainty when confronted with this. And when I went off exploring Fernando’s neighborhood in those first few weeks, on skates, I found the small houses humbler and more appropriate, as if they were bowing their heads, and there the people who smiled and greeted me seemed to share a little of that same solitude. As if their smiles said: tell me about it.
In those days, avid for information, I read that the entire state of Colorado had fewer inhabitants than the city of Rio de Janeiro. And I knew that the mountains of Rio de Janeiro, albeit for other reasons, were also laughing at their city. Those tropical mountains that had been stripped of entire forests. Mountains that had risen up out of the ground by the sea, which the city scaled and scaled, on which people built as best they could with whatever materials were to hand. The constructions subsided from time to time with the rains and people rebuilt them as best they could.
The mountains didn’t discriminate. The relationship was different there: the city grew on top of them, rolling boulders. It reminded me of a story my mother had once told me about the unfortunate Greek King Sisyphus, who, because of a mess he’d gotten himself into (the mythological Greeks were always getting into trouble: they were megalomaniacs and undisciplined), was sentenced by the gods to roll an enormous boulder up a steep hill. But it kept rolling back down and he had to start all over again. I imagined those sadistic Greek gods watching Sisyphus work for all of eternity like a group of old ladies sitting around drinking tea, reeking of sweet perfume and making comments dripping with avarice and bitter frustration about the sinful ways of the new generations. With pieces of cake stuck to their teeth and eyebrows that had been plucked too thin.
From the mountains of Rio de Janeiro people: went hang-gliding. Fired guns. Saw the rest of Rio de Janeiro down below and the crashing waves that looked like a motionless strip of white foam.
The mountains of Rio de Janeiro were laughing, deep in their intimacy of earth and stone and roots and organic matter from dead leaves and animals and dumped dead bodies; they were laughing at all that anxious human drama: people love one another, kill one another, roll boulders, and at the end of the day
none of it makes much difference. The mountains’ time is different; so are their frames of reference.
Maybe it had all begun thirteen millennia earlier. Or thirteen years. How could I be sure? Perhaps by prodding the wound that wasn’t exactly a wound (and anyway everyone had more serious things to worry about). Perhaps by talking to the ghost of William F. Cody, the original Buffalo Bill (people visiting his grave could
feel the breezes from the high peaks of the Continental Divide, smell the pines and watch the mountain wildlife, all just thirty minutes from downtown Denver
. See something? Hear something?) Perhaps by reading the message in a handful of magic sand at the Chimayo sanctuary, while the woman cried
me puedes ayudar, un dólar por favor
(it was her job, like the guy who used to take his shirt off, dislocate his shoulder and beg for money in the middle of downtown Rio de Janeiro: people would grimace involuntarily when they saw him and give him some loose change. Then the man would go behind the Municipal Theater and put his shoulder back in place). I would give the woman the dollar she was asking for while Fernando ignored her, asking in a low voice how I could fall for it, but it was my money and my problem.
The world didn’t owe me anything, but it didn’t stop me from haphazardly following a haphazardly-drawn path, which was of no importance in anyone’s life, and which could have passed as in fact it did: on the sidelines of everything. Almost a blank.
But let’s just say, for the sake of this story, that everything began with her. Thirteen years earlier.
She was the one who had taught me English and Spanish. It was what she knew how to do. If she’d been a yoga teacher, she’d have spent twelve years teaching me yoga, and if she’d worked on the land I’d have had a hoe before I’d even learned to talk. It was what she knew how to do, and she thought it a waste not to pass on to me, for free, as an inheritance, some kind of knowledge.